While I was at the Handmade in Hawaii event this weekend, I found crafters making surfboards from scratch.The wood they were working with is from the Breadfruit tree, and was quite the score. People here avoid cutting these rare trees, but the crafters found this piece in a brush pile in someone’s yard. They scavenged […]
Alan Parekh of Hacked Gadgets made this really nice looking gear clock using a PIC microcontroller, a scavenged stepper motor, and a bunch of wooden gears that he cut out on a CNC router.
Woodworking Magazine ran an Altoids tin contest. Here are some of the results. The winning entry was Tom Bier’s router plane (top three pics). Runners up included Kevin Bosse’s light-duty vise and Kevin Hurbanis off-set gauge. Thanks to @JeffreyGifford for the Twitter tip-off The Winner of Our Altoids Tool Contest
OK, so it’s not like smurf-blue, but still: Blue hardwood! It comes from Talipariti elatum, the so-called “Blue Mahoe” tree, which is native to the Caribbean and is, apparently, the national tree of Jamaica. Turns out it also grows very quickly and shows some promise for sustainable forestry. Lumber is available through Tropic Ventures.
Here’s a traditional wood-bending technique that seems ready-made for CNC millers, and yet I can’t find much online evidence that it’s being done. To make a kerf-bend, the wood is first corrugated on the inside of the intended radius. The width, depth, number, and spacing of the kerfs all affect the qualities of the finished […]
Turns out you can bend lumber into some pretty amazing shapes if you first soften it by exposure to steam. Just how long it needs to “soak” in the steam varies with the species and thickness of the wood in question, but the necessary equipment is dirt cheap. This great tutorial over at the Dewalt […]
I wanted to share this email from Eleanor M. Rust who wrote to say that community colleges in California are a great resource for makers who want to learn new skills. I just bought my first copy of MAKE after being a CRAFT reader for a while, and I’m really enjoying it! But a remark […]
